Author Archives: oinsketta

The Dog Still Cries

The suffering dog is still crying two hours later, now under brilliant sunshine.  I made my way through the wet leaves to see if he was OK.  “Hey, Hercules, are you OK?” I called and he stopped crying for a moment, turned briefly to regard me with sad, wolfish eyes.  A second later he resumed his post at the gate, mewling with all his heart.

I called the neighbor, Joe, a native Chinese speaker with a working knowledge of English. I introduced myself and told him his dog was in the backyard crying for the last two hours.

“My daughter?” he asked with great concern.

“No, no. Hercules,” I said.

“Ah, he is crying cause I put him in the cage.  I have people coming to the yard.  He doesn’t like to be in the cage, but I had to put him in because I don’t want trouble, you know?  So he’s crying to get out of the cage,” Joe said, then imitated the exact cry of his watchdog.  Then he thanked me several times and told me he’d call his wife, tell her to let the dog out now.

Sekhnet was relieved when I called to give her the news.  The dog is still filling the humid afternoon with his soulful calls.

Political Research: Who Owns the Deficit?

This post is in the process of revision, as I struggle through more conflicting facts and figures.  I wish the numbers were simpler, smaller, easier to make a point about.  The complexity, of course, is as much the problem as the sure-handed oversimplifications that are often offered instead of real discourse.  I’ll give a heads up in a later post when I’ve learned enough to make this as comprehensive and understandable as I’d like it to be.

DRAFT ONE

There are two numbers that should be part of the discussion as a TV hypnotized America goes about choosing a new president.  2.4 trillion dollars– the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan plus the Bush tax cuts to the top 5%  (see below) and 1.1 trillion dollars, the projected deficit for 2012 (see fair and balanced source).  These numbers are largely unknown while politicians negotiate over how to economize on a scaled down New Deal safety net without raising additional revenues during these hard economic times.  

Why don’t Americans know these numbers?

The amount being spent for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, (excluding the projected cost of long term care for thousands of grievously disabled twenty and thirty year-old veterans) is $1,367,222,688,159 and counting — (source:  http://costofwar.com  )  Note that this figure excludes long term cost of caring for wounded veterans, which probably more than doubles the number.  A study at Brown University concluded the total cost of the wars will be as much as 4 trillion.

Lost revenue in tax breaks to the the top 5% of Americans during the more than decade of the Bush Tax Cuts:  $1,034,424,338,581, with 70% of that, or 700 billion dollars, going to the top 1%. (source)

This sum, wars plus tax cuts, a conservative two trillion four hundred billion dollars, must be part of any serious discussion of the deficit and how to fix it.   This 2.4 trillion should be a number every American can cite when discussing the responsibility of our current president for the grim economic backdrop to what Bill Moyers referred to as the auction for the presidency.

But further research shows how difficult it is to present the exact numbers that all Americans should know.  The 2012 deficit is different than the cumulative deficit, which is different than the national debt.   Look at this graph, if you want your head to spin, 

We talk in terms of billions, we might as well be talking in terms of gazillions or quadrillions.  These abstractions are so large that the eight or nine billion dollars that disappeared in Iraq, under the watchful nose of  L. Paul Bremmer III,  Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, early in the occupation of Iraq, slips quietly under the radar while politicians seriously debate cutting the heating subsidies to just over the poverty line old people here in the US.  It would save millions of dollars, they argue.  And old people can always put on sweaters, scarves, hats, gloves, parkas, etc.  It’s easier to stay warm than to stay cool, think of it that way.

Partisans of Mr. Romney, including PAC-genius Karl Rove, the man our previous president called “The Architect” ( as well, apparently, as “Turd Blossom”) will begin waving the flag to beat the band as they speak quickly of how the Bush administration saved us all from certain destruction by Al Qaeda (there was no second catastrophic terrorist attack on their watch, after all) and rewarded the job-creators by giving them even more incentive to create jobs.  

Then they’ll quickly change the subject, since George W. Bush, for all the good he did for his constituency, is not the poster child for smaller, smarter government, nor any kind of fiscal conservative.  And, if pressed, they might be tempted to concede that Mr. Bush did drain the record surplus and run up a record deficit like a car collecting trust fund baby in a Rolls Royce dealership buying one in every color, before helicoptering off to the Porsche dealer.

As Bill Moyers pointed out, during the excitement among many after Obama’s election as president, Barack Obama will disappoint.  Every president does, he continued.  No sadder, truer words were spoken about that election.  I have often wondered about the forces that constrain the president, a great salesman and educator, from educating and selling higher goals and policies than the ones he’s shot for.

“He doesn’t want to get shot,” says one friend.

“He doesn’t want to piss off his top supporters on Wall Street, he needs their millions for the billion dollar reelection campaign he’s going to have to wage,” says another.

“He is a pragmatist,” says another.

“He doesn’t stand for real change, he stands, like anyone with the backing to become president, for the status quo,” says another.

Be assured that Karl Rove will do everything in his considerable power to make Mitt Romney the next president of the United States.  His former protegee will be left quietly on the sidelines, since discussion of his record would cloud the primary issue: that radical Barack Obama is a weak and misguided president who got us into this terrible financial mess and then had only failed ideas for how to get us out of it.

Demographic mystery

As I’ve noted, I tend to look at the “stats” for this blahg a few times a day.  I see how many times my writer friend in Gaj, Poland appears as a dot on the map of Europe, how many of my countrymen have checked in.  The slope of readers is a sliding pond down, tapering toward the zero sum many see life as.

“And if I suddenly had 20,000 readers a day?” I ask myself, “how would that change my life?”  Then I realize, it would be succulent data I could provide to a publisher to show they could sell my writing.  How would that change my life?  A nice thought.  

But as readership clings to single digits I ponder another mystery.  I’ve had a few visits by strangers.  I don’t know how they find their way to the posts, but four have pressed the “like” button and invited me to their sites.  Each of those four was interesting.  But here’s the mystery:

Yesterday I wrote something about false dichotomies, Line and Color.  I hit “publish” sometime around 1:30 pm.  Shortly afterwards I had two emails informing me that two people, with blahgs of their own, liked the piece.  I was gratified, visited their blahgs, was pleased to meet them.  Yet, when I checked my stats later, neither of these Americans showed up.   Three views, all from Gaj and nearby Krakow, Poland, as my writer friend made his rounds with his laptop.

A demographic mystery, I would say.

The dog cries in the rain

The Chinese couple who live in the house behind the garden kept two watchdogs in an outdoor run.  The dogs were there in every kind of weather.  One of the dogs died about a year ago.  The remaining one is fairly quiet, not much barking comes from there anymore.  You occasionally see a feral cat perched on the top of the dog’s enclosure, he doesn’t seem to mind.

The couple came from China, literally escaped from China.  They’ve made a good life in America, working hard in a busy contracting business, they own two adjacent houses they have fixed up beautifully.   The dog run is behind the house they rent out.  They exchanged bemused smiles about Sekhnet’s and my attachment to the feral cats who used to live in the garden.  In hard times in China cat is good for a decent stew, not to walk around your house, seemed to be their attitude.

The sky turned grey just now and rain began pelting down.  I sat at the computer for my daily tapping, an hour or so where I feel in control in an out of control world.  As the cold rain began the dog in his coverless run began to cry.  He is crying as I write, piteous howling cries.  He is not barking, he is crying, inconsolably.  Moaning helplessly, the sobs really are terrible to hear.  He’s baying, imploring someone to let him in out of the rain.  He’s an old dog, soaked to the skin, and he’s cried continuously as I write these words.

“Don’t tell me about it,” said Sekhnet, on the verge of tears when I called to tell her about it.  “They must not be home,” she said.

A nice thought, that they aren’t home.  They’re such nice people, I’d hate to think they could ignore the cries of their dog, even if he is just a guard and something without a soul to them.

Meantime, anyone hearing the sorrowful song this dog is singing would know instantly about the soul inside, suffering like any sentient being and appealing helplessly for help.  I wish I had some way to help the poor guy, though he’d probably be too upset, and proud, not to bark at me and show his teeth if I approached through the wet leaves with a pancho for him.  Not that he’d wear a pancho anyway.

A Story About Politics

Humans are hungry for a story.  I’m not saying anything you don’t know.  A speaker who does not incorporate a few stories is a very dry speaker indeed.  When we hear even a lying politician say “let me tell you a story…” we are momentarily attentive.  Every ad we see tells a little story.  Stories are how we learn about life.

No less an expert than Adolf Hitler (no matter how we may hate the success he had, none can doubt the magnitude of that success) emphasized the importance of story in creating a community of believers.  He was constantly creating the myth, constantly reinforcing the worldview founded on that myth, a worldview that was the foundation for his actions.   That’s why he loved the work the unscrupulous fellows in the British, French and American War Departments did during the World War.  Give the folks at home, and the soldiers in the trenches, a vivid and horrible story they can sink their teeth into, digest, take to heart!  That the story is a lie makes no difference.  In fact, Hitler noted, a lie is often more powerful than the truth.

During a brief stint in a doctoral program in history I was determined to write the definitive study of how propaganda and marketing have shaped our world more than any other single force.  The professor I pitched the idea to, that the Nazis were the innovative pioneers of the modern marketing-driven use of a party controlled mass media to influence the citizenry, shook his head skeptically, scaled my project way back.  The hubris of my intended task seems obvious to me now too, as I think of it, but I believe as firmly now as I did back then that the Nazis showed how it was done, developed many of the techniques now standard for influencing public perceptions.   Events are increasingly supporting my thesis.  

The Big Lie, endlessly repeating useful untruths in the mass media, is now a familiar idea that doesn’t raise too many eyebrows.  It’s old hat.  “Yeah, yeah, Saddam bought aluminum tubes in Africa for his nuclear centrifuge.  Yeah, he had WMD.  Yeah, we don’t want ‘the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud’.  Yeah, Saddam was a big supporter of Bin Laden, even though Bin Laden wanted him dead.  Yeah, Muhammad Atta met with agents of Saddam in Prague before the September 11 attacks.  Yeah, Saddam was behind 9/11.  Yeah, we’ll fight them over there so we don’t have to fight ’em here.  Yeah, freedom’s on the march, combat operations are over, we have prevailed over Evil.  Yeah, so what’s your point?”

At the risk of seeming partisan I will make an observation others before me have made.  The Republican party is much more successful in telling (and selling) a coherent and moving story than the Democrats are.  The Republican story goes like this:

 Once upon a time this great, innovative country was greater still.   We had values that were a light unto the world, not least of them democracy, fairness, freedom.  We are now in a crisis, caused by Americans who take freedom for granted (0r outright hate our freedom), do not want to work, want to blame others, especially successful people, for their troubles.  And Big Government, and we all know how corrupt that is, is right in the middle of the problem.

The problem is all those illegal aliens getting free medical care and free college educations, old people expecting the rest of us to subsidize their rent and heating bills, pay for their fantastically expensive health care, young lazy people who feel entitled to take our money so they don’t have to work.  (We’ll leave aside the politically explosive, nagging, unspoken question of what those people we used to call niggers actually want.  Let’s stay on the high road and focus on getting America back to greatness.)  

We need to give complete freedom to the free market.  The free market is great because it’s free.  The leaders of the free market must be free to innovate, to take great risks for potentially enormous, unregulated rewards.  To regulate these rewards would hamper job-creating entrepreneurs in their enthusiasm to take the risks that have made this country the world’s leading innovator for more than two centuries.  Besides, Big Government, who would decide on and enforce regulation, is bad, part of the problem, not part of any solution.

Democrats have no counter-narrative, none.  At best they will quibblingly point out that big government is bad, except when it enforces the rights of former slaves not to be lynched, except when it gives women the right to vote, rescues flood victims, frees hostages, builds highways, bridges, tunnels, schools, firehouses, police stations, avoids foreign wars through diplomacy, guarantees that old people who’ve worked their whole lives don’t have to eat dog food too many times a week, that people who’ve lost their jobs in a trashed economy do not also automatically have to lose their homes.  It’s no story, it’s a yawn, however true it all might be.

Democrats, if they’re feeling brave, will point out that the terms used, like “free market”, are problematic, misleading.  If the free market is free to employ the cheapest laborers to be found in a global marketplace, to pollute air, water and earth as much as needed to make maximum profit, to pay the lowest possible taxes and exercise the greatest possible political influence by buying unlimited political advertising, maybe the price for that “free” market is a bit more than the rest of us can afford.

Or the “Death Tax.”  Shoot, everyone is against death and tax.  The Republicans control that debate right there, having coined the phrase that frames and decides the debate.  I don’t recall the amount of millions that trigger the “Death Tax”, I think it’s up to eight million, but it’s many more millions than 98% of Americans will see in their lifetimes, let alone have the chance to leave tax-free to their daughter, Paris Hilton.

Paris, there’s a story.  We can all picture her face, feel the emotions this rich girl inspires, be they the envy of those who call her a “celebutard” or the love of those, like me, who observed the true tenderness she displayed giving pleasure to her lover in that short video.  But, anyway, you see how much more interesting a story is than talking about “politics”?  A story speaks for itself, politics is an unbearable swirl of depressingly complicated detail that can best be understood by oversimplifying its complexities into a good story.

I love you, Paris.

Line and Color

I love lines, which come into existence mainly under a human hand.  I love making lines, dragging ink, or graphite, or a color, over a surface.  I love refining them (though I almost never erase them).   Making lines on a page is one of the great pleasures of my life, and one of the great exercises in freedom.   Often it doesn’t matter what those lines form themselves into– words, symbols, images– the tactile pleasure of making the lines remains.

You can see tiny kids scribbling, making lines is clearly a pleasure one can appreciate early on.  As the fine motor skills improve, the enjoyment of making purposeful lines grows too, but there is enjoyment to be had even scrawling, the pen gripped in a hand that is like a foot.

Since we live in a highly specialized world of false dichotomies, where everything is set against something else, we often hear visual artists divided into draftsmen (their craft being line) and colorists (their realm being the juxtaposition and combination of colors.)   Line or Color, take your pick.  

If I had to pick one, and fortunately I don’t, it would be line.  I love color, to be sure: it’s an incomparable pleasure to pour a beautifully colored ink on to a white page, watch it shine like a wet floor then dry into a luminous panel of pure color.  Or to blend them, or mix two or more colors to alchemize them into a new one.  I’d be hard pressed to pick my favorite color.  I love a golden yellow, a little more orange than a sunflower’s petals, but I also love the blue gradient of the sky toward sundown.  I love scarlet, mustard color, many browns, the green of a tender sprout, hippie purple, grey.  Shoot, I love ’em all.  There are very few colors that leave me indifferent.

But with line, and enough determination to learn how to wield it, you can create many gradations between black and white.  These blocks of gradated darker and lighter blacks form a kind of color too, though without chroma.   You can make lines with color, of course, but a colorist isn’t primarily interested in that.

It is like this in many things humans do.  In music there is rhythm and melody, sometimes held to be distinct in the manner of line and color.  I find that line and color work best together, enhance each other ridiculously.  Same with rhythm and melody.  You can play in tune, play all the right notes, but it isn’t music unless it they are sounded and held against the rhythm.  In that regard, like the false choice between line and color, I’d have to pick rhythm if I could only have one.  A song without melody is not much of a song, but a song without rhythm, what the hell is that?

I close this little shot-in-the-dark with an observation about writing and another false dichotomy: love of language or love of story.  In the previous post I briefly compared books by William Kennedy, a former prize-winning journalist turned prize-wining novelist, and Stephen King, fantastically imaginative writer of numerous books that have been made into justly famous movies as varied as Carrie, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.  Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize winning Ironweed was made into a movie starring Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, Fred Gwynne, Nathan Lane and Tom Waits, for the record.

I described Kennedy as being in love with language, and spreading its colors lushly on the page, and King as more plain-spoken and focused on the story, more of a draftsman laying down the essentials with a sharp, bold line.  Both writers are in love with language (who wouldn’t be in love with this miracle?) and both are intent on telling their stories.  Kennedy is more flamboyantly in love with words, King more low-key about it.  My favorite writer, Isaac Babel (as artfully translated by Walter Morrison) was madly in love with language and an inspired teller of highly condensed tales.  He tells unforgettable stories and doesn’t waste a perfectly-chosen word while painting scenes and drawing characters.  There is a line we dance on as we proceed, considering which darlings to murder and how, composed of all the colors of the rainbow.

What is it?

It’s astounding to realize that there are literally millions of people keeping journals on-line.  Countless web logs, “blogs”, bloggers, tweeters, twitterers, content creators of every stripe, filling the air with song and noise on tens of thousands of subjects.  A chorus of millions who can only potentially hear each other. 

Is this just the suddenly available mass expression of Zora Neale Hurston’s oldest human longing?  The need to tell our story to another, to be heard as we reveal what moves us?   I looked for the quote just now on the internet, my battered copy of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God miles from where I’m typing now.  I recalled the scene of the two women talking in the night, filled with ‘that oldest human longing’, to make themselves known to each other.  Perhaps it mixes in my memory with proverbs I loved, since I read the book decades ago, but the quote I found “They sat there in the fresh young darkness close together. Janie full of that oldest human longing -self-revelation,” seemed less elemental than the one I remember Hurston hitting me with when I was in my twenties.

Never mind.  I am sending these words out like the solitary space traveller forcing a rolled up slip of paper into an air-tight bottle and ejecting it through a one-way valve into the black infinity of space.

Wondering about this oldest human longing, as I recall the long story I heard last night of a new friend’s travails in an Asian military academy thirty years ago.  I sat at his kitchen table, with other things on my mind, like a guitar that needed to be fixed, though neither of us knew exactly how to get at the electronics inside the F-hole, and listened to a long story about things that happened decades ago.  I listened carefully, as I am only now learning to do, and reminded him a couple of times, when he got tangled up, where his diversions had taken off from.  The stories were interesting and put me in mind of others, which I did not tell, preferring to hear where these were going. 

I thought of Sammy, Sekhnet’s father, someone she often dismissed when I first met her.  I am interested in stories, particularly the stories old people tell of a disappeared world I can only imagine.  I have questions for them.  They like that, but not too many, of course, because they are trying to tell a story.  Sammy and I got along very well, largely because I was genuinely interested in what he had to say.  Another part of that oldest human longing, to have our words taken in respectfully by someone else.  But story, I notice over and over, is key.

I thought of two books I took out of the library recently.  One was by William Kennedy, the other by Stephen King.  Kennedy started with a flourish, his agile prose a song snapping like a flag in the breeze, now moving like a tango, now to sweaty barrelhouse piano twelve hundred miles north.  Soon he was dancing out his sheer love for language and dealing ten flavors of nuance, as a complicated story began to decant itself.  I read the first chapter, then took a look at King’s novel.  King did not flourish anything, there was no dance, he never sang more than a note or two.  He started right off, in an engaging voice, telling the story I soon found myself reading until it was told, 500 pages later.  I later finished Kennedy’s book and liked it too, but I was sucked directly into the story King was intent on telling me in 11/22/63.  The name of Kennedy’s book did not stick with me.

The writer recommends

A prolific writer, whose many books have moved and entertained me, periodically writes a slim book of advice, a nonfiction attempt to be part of the change he wants to see in the world.  I have one here now, called Twelve Steps Toward Political Revelation.  I have to say, he does his work much better in fiction, like in the magnificent recent novella The Gift of Fire.

Read The Gift of Fire with an open mind and you may find yourself deeply moved by the author’s vivid, animated example of the kind of world humans could have if we followed our deeper, higher natures.  A description of the story will not do the short book justice, get it from the library, read it.  Another great book by my favorite living writer.  I highly recommend it.

We turn now to his latest book of advice.  Published because he is a famous writer who has made millions for his publisher, it has little of the charm of the novels, but it moves toward the same end– showing what the world could be, if people only struggled to open their eyes and live in accord with what we all know in our hearts to be the right way to live.

One of the twelve steps the author prescribes for waking from our media-induced trance and finding out who we are and how to fix this severely broken world is to write daily.  My man is a writer, and he writes daily, and he is paid well several times a year for his new books, probably given large advances for each next one.  He’s had books made into Hollywood movies starring Denzel Washington.  He lives the life I’d like to live, if I had any idea how to start down that road.

He gets up every day and writes for three or four hours.  That’s his work day.  Then he goes out into the world, does whatever one does out there.  Returns at night to sleep.  Gets up the next day and writes for three or four hours, and so forth.  Every few months, it would appear, he has a new manuscript finished.  It goes to his editor, they work it over a bit, it’s out in print and I get a copy of it it at my local library.  A nice arrangement for everyone.

Step Six of the Twelve Steps Toward Political Revolution is called Everyday.  What we should do every day, those of us who are serious about not living as exploited zombies but doing what we are meant to do on this earth, is to write.  This should be done, the writer says, 365 days a year.  He says we don’t need to spend much time doing this, the drill is that it must be done daily.  The time of day doesn’t matter, after work, before work, the main thing is to have a regular practice that sits us alone with our thoughts daily and causes us to organize them while digging toward the deeper truths of our lives.

“Yes,” I think, “it is a good practice.  Shoot, I do it myself.  But you must realize, man who makes his living by writing what it pleases you to write, that it is easier for you to put in the recommended  ninety minutes to two hours a day searching your soul than it is for the bus driver, the cop, the campaign contribution bundler, the single mother with three kids, the school teacher, the data technician, the salesman, the career guardian ad litem.”

I don’t know where else to go with this thought, except to note that this famous writer and I were in the Creative Writing program at The City College at the same time.  His mentor was a guy named Tuten, mine was Mirsky, and our paths never crossed, that I can recall.  His imagination and drive led him to create a brooding detective character that became a franchise.  I was less productively consumed by my brooding which rumbled through the more amorphous and problematic things I produced.  I assume Tuten was a help to him, I believe I read something to that effect.

Mirsky always expressed a great belief in the importance of what I was writing, and lamented that, like much of his recent work, there was just no place in the market to sell it.  He did eventually hook me up with an editor, the grand-daughter of the Straus from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.   Somewhere I still have the accomplished young English major’s letter.  The writing was good, she said, but the pages I’d sent her indicated that the narrator had not undergone the kind of epiphany and transformation necessary for every great novel.  She closed with kind regards.

What I know about the guy

I don’t know much.  He owned a very successful factory, employing many.  He is a writer of songs and stories.  He likes to talk, sing and perform.

During the longest conversation I had with him he told me that his father was a gambler who was either rich or one step ahead of the landlord.  He told me the family had moved forty-two times before he was fifteen, often at night.

For his bar-mitzvah, when he was thirteen, his father was flush.  800 people were invited, there was sixty singer boy choir and a diva from the opera.

Then they were running again, one step in front of creditors. He vowed never to be like his father.

He has a difficult relationship with a very troubled son in college.